Office Of Cards: A practical guide to success and happiness in large organisations (and life)

By Davide Cervellin

Have you ever felt oppressed by nonsense in your corporate job? Or experienced useless meetings in which nothing gets decided? Or maybe seen a good idea killed by a political play?

So have I.

And I understood that there were things I had to learn if I wanted to find a way to deal with these situations and succeed and be happy in larg

• Language: English
• Publisher: Davide Cervellin
• Release date: Aug 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781916445611

Davide Cervellin

Davide Cervellin, born in 1980 in Verona, Italy, with a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Politecnico of Milan, is an Analytics Leader, nominated as one of the Top 100 Influential People in Data Driven Businesses (UK, 2018). His experience includes companies like Siemens, Vodafone, Pirelli, eBay, PayPal. He also advises and coaches several startups (among which Metrilo and Avora), large companies (such as Disney and Qlik), and also universities (such as Politecnico of Milan and Ca' Foscari of Venice). He has been a keynote speaker at over 20 conferences all over Europe. He has lived in Italy, Switzerland, England and has had the chance to work with, and manage, people from all over the world. All these experiences have provided him with invaluable material for this book. He now lives in Amsterdam with his partner Cinzia and his daughter Arya, works for Booking.com and spends his free time studying new recipes and looking for great vintage wines. Find more on www.linkedin.com/in/davidecervellin/ or www.officeofcards.com.

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Office of Cards

A practical guide to success and happiness in large organizations (and life)

Davide Cervellin

First Edition August 2018

© 2018 Davide Cervellin

All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

References to external material such as books, websites and podcasts belong to the relevant authors.

978-1-9164456-1-1

Editor: Helen Keevy

Cover Design: Luca Righetti

Drawings: Cinzia Barbieri

Typeset in Whitney HTF and Bembo Std

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1 – CAN YOU BE HAPPY IN THE CORPORATE WORLD?

A corporate survival guide

My tipping point

A corporate success framework

You are responsible for your own success

What’s covered in the book

A final word before we start

CHAPTER 2 - UNDERSTAND BIG ORGANIZATIONS

What’s good about corporate?

What’s not to like then?

The corporate dark side

The bozo effect and the curse of bad managers

The illusion of greener grass

CHAPTER 3 – WORK OUT WHAT YOU WANT

What’s important to you?

A means or an end?

Building yourself a job compass

Envisioning your journey

Using your map and compass

Comparing opportunities

Changing your destination

CHAPTER 4 – OPEN YOURSELF TO LEARNING

Becoming the best version of yourself

Change your mindset

Trick yourself into trying

Being an omnivorous learning animal

Suspend judgement and interrogate bias

CHAPTER 5 – MASTER YOUR BEHAVIOURS

How habits form

Identify your habits

Hone your habits

Tone it up (or down)

Use your body

Suit up

CHAPTER 6 – RECRUIT YOUR SUPPORT CREW

Drop the whiners

Be selfless

Build your network

Appoint your board of directors

CHAPTER 7 – TAKE CHARGE OF YOUR EMOTIONS

A positive attitude

Detachment

Get perspective on your mistakes

Keep calm and stay in control

Your happiness balance

Create meaning in your every day

CHAPTER 8 – GET PEOPLE TO LIKE YOU

The importance of mastering relationships

How you make people feel

Your conscious and subconscious imprint

Smile and stop complaining

Be interested

CHAPTER 9 – KNOW WHAT CONSENSUS MEANS FOR YOU

Consensus – feeling the problem

Perception is reality

Avoiding arguments at all costs

Keeping friends in a closed system

CHAPTER 10 – BECOME AN IDEA-SELLING MAESTRO

Be prepared

Know what motivates people

Share your thinking early

Make them think it’s their idea

Respect other people’s opinions

Questions over statements

The yes-pattern

Use props and drama

CHAPTER 11 – PLAY THE LONG GAME IN EVERY SITUATION

Don’t throw people in the deep end

Give feedback well

Take feedback well

Admit your mistakes

Let others fix their own mistakes

Don’t humiliate anyone in public

Be false in tricky situations

Plan for promotion

CHAPTER 12 – IN CONCLUSION

The Corporate Truths

The Rules for Winning

The Principles for Playing the Game

A FINAL WORD

OFFICE EXTRAS – SOME ADVICE ON THE PRACTICAL STUFF

PART 1: Getting a job you love

PART 2: Succeeding in your new job

SUGGESTED READING AND LISTENING

GRATITUDE

PROLOGUE

This is great. You should write a book about this stuff.

Alessandro, a friend of mine, over dinner

January 2017

You may be asking yourself: why another book on how to be successful? Aren’t there enough of those out there? Written by people who are surely more qualified than me: psychologists, accomplished founders, CEOs, politicians, recognized leaders?

Yes, there are. And most of them are great books filled with lessons that have shaped my life and my thinking in very deep ways. Some of them I refer to in this very book.

But these books are by great people. They sometimes describe things that aren’t accessible to everyone, use examples that are sometimes difficult to relate to, and teach lessons that aren’t always immediately applicable to normal people.

I’m 37 years old and a middle manager in a large corporation; I lead teams, but I also have a lot of people senior to me. I’ve had a good career so far, but I’ve also made a lot of mistakes, which I hope this book might help you avoid.

Plenty of people at age 37 have accomplished a lot more than I have, which is why I think this book is different. This book is written by a normal person for other normal people. By someone who could very easily be a colleague of yours. Someone you might talk to over a coffee, someone who is sharing stories and examples that hopefully relate to your everyday life more than what Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos were doing at age 37.

For a significant part of my life, I thought large organizations were boring, hierarchical, boss-decides-all, slow-moving, stagnating places. I thought startups were so much cooler: exciting, nimble, fast-moving, best-idea-wins types of places. Therefore, I thought they were the place to be, that happiness and professional satisfaction were impossible to achieve in a large corporation.

Little did I know that changing the environment was not the solution, I simply needed to change myself to be happy and successful in a large corporation. By making changes in my professional life, I realized I was also improving as a person, in my relationships with basically everyone I knew.

Since the day I started managing people, I realized that my words, and my actions, could have a massive impact on the mood and the behaviours of my team mates. So, I started being very mindful about what I said and did.

And I came to understand that there are no words to describe the feeling when someone comes to you to thank you for the suggestion, the guidance or the example that helped them in their career and their life. It’s one of the purest feelings of joy a person can experience.

That is why I wrote this book. I don’t want to teach anything to anybody; I’m not qualified to do that. I simply want to share the same things I tell my teams every single day, the lessons I’ve learned, the mistakes I’ve made and how I could have seen some of them coming and avoided them. Hopefully, through this book, I will be able to have an impact on even more people, more than those I work with every day.

In this book you’ll see how my approach to learning and growing all the time has helped me steer my career out of a stagnant phase I found myself in. Hopefully it’ll inspire you to do the same if you’re in a similar situation and are unhappy with your day-to-day.

Hopefully it’ll help you see the world you live in from a different perspective and offer you tools to engineer it, rather than accepting it is the way it is and just resigning yourself to moving inside it. I use the term life engineering (credit to my brother for this one), because with time and patience life can be engineered to work better if you use the right tools and approaches.

I don’t talk about hacks and quick wins, because there are no such things in life. But I do talk about planning, cause and effect, having impact, controlling your emotions, achieving more and being happier.

I have only one ask of you, the reader, and that is: keep an open mind. At some points in this book you may say, Ah, but that’s impossible!, or maybe OK, that’s you, but I can’t do that. Some of my friends, after they’d reviewed the book, told me that was their reaction when reading certain sections.

If you feel like that at times, just stop for a second, literally. Close the book, find a mirror and while standing in front of it say out loud, I cannot do XYZ. Don’t just think I can’t, have the courage to say it out loud. It won’t be easy to admit to yourself that you can’t do something, which is the whole point!

You can do more than you think, you just need to keep your mind open to suggestions and make sure you assess what can and cannot be done based on logic, not on your habits, or what you’ve always done. Now try replacing the statement I cannot do XYZ with "What if I could do XYZ?, or What is really preventing me from doing XYZ?" Assume you can, and focus on the how.

That’s all I’m asking you to do, to consider it.

In reviewing this book, my brother offered some further advice and closed his email by saying, "Even if you don’t sell billions of copies, be aware that at least it will be useful to me ." Well then, mission accomplished, at least with him.

Now over to you.

Davide

PS: THANK YOU for believing this book can help you, for wanting to develop, for keeping an open mind, for believing in yourself, and for helping others develop and

be happier.

CHAPTER 1 – CAN YOU BE HAPPY IN THE CORPORATE WORLD?

IN THIS CHAPTER: Who is this book for? What can it help you achieve? And, is it possible to be happy and satisfied in the corporate world?

I’m a man of numbers. I love them because they can often give you an objective view on things, some sort of common ground where people can look at the world through a lens that leaves little open to interpretation. In a word, to me numbers provide comfort.

If you’re not a numbers person, don’t worry, there aren’t many numbers in this book. I mention them just because a particular set of numbers are part of the reason I wrote it. They’re about the UK working population.

32% of people are self-employed or work for companies with fewer than 10 employees

28% of people work for companies with between 10 and 250 employees, and

40% of people work for corporations with more than 250 employees.¹

I’m quite sure similar statistics apply to most developed countries. Given the numbers, it’s interesting how much literature there is on how to find happiness in running (or working for) startups and small companies. It would seem the only way to be happy with your job is to join, or found, a startup. So much has been written on how magical the atmosphere can be when you experience exponential growth, and how energizing it is to build something from nothing. How the satisfaction of working towards a purpose makes everything else irrelevant.

It’s fascinating to read books like The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, Zero to One by Peter Thiel or Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moor. As a talented and ambitious person, you feel inspired, and you think, I want the same and I can do the same! And so, a lot of people who are unhappy in their corporate jobs quit to create a startup, or to join one, hoping that they can become the next Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

Great logic, but how often does that kind of startup success happen? How many people can say, I was at that company in the early days and it was awesome. We were free to pursue our goals, no boundaries, no processes, just plain purpose. Maybe even: I built that company, and now that I’ve sold it, I’m a millionaire. Perhaps some of the employees of Facebook, Google and Tesla? That is, in the first three to four years, before those companies became corporates too.

I don’t know for sure, but my guess is there aren’t many people like these. Maybe they could all fit on a single plane? The numbers support this too: an article published by Fast Company, citing a study done by Statistic Brain, said that in the US, 50% of startups fail within a few years, and over 70% fail within 10 years. There are similar statistics for other countries. Yes, you’ll find articles with slightly different numbers, but the point is: most startups fail. And that is a problem if you are employed in one of those that fails.

So, what about the rest of us?

If you’re part of the 40% who work in large organizations, there isn’t much content available to tell you how to be happy in that kind of environment, how to make it work for you without leaving and becoming your own boss.

Some people have great careers in large organizations; they thrive in them, get promoted frequently, get big jobs, make lots of money, have good benefits. But the majority don’t thrive, they don’t seem to be happy. They end up staying there unhappy or hopping from job to job or company to company, constantly seeking something they never seem to be able to find, ultimately landing in a startup hoping it’s the solution and their final destination. But it rarely is.

Being happy in the workplace, as in any relationship, is the result of a transaction: you give your time, sweat and tears, and you get some money for it, or professional satisfaction, training, rewards. It’s a quid pro quo all the time; you give, and you get. The problems arise when you think you’re giving more than you’re getting, or when you think people who give less than you get more than you. We’ll explore this further in this book, because here is the first bit of corporate truth for you: nobody will ever reward you for the quantity of things you give. Not. Ever.

Some people feel happy in getting their job done. They enjoy a combination of professional and personal rewards which, together with their salary, give them a balanced life they enjoy.

Other people, unfortunately, can’t seem to find this balance. I was in this bucket for seven years, and I started to think that was how it would be until the day I retire. In my experience, we spend our time thinking we could be happier somewhere else. Perhaps freelancing, perhaps working in a startup, or maybe in another large organization (although we often rule that out because organizations tend to look the same, so we subconsciously think: A startup has to be different). We think that a different work environment, a different boss or different colleagues will solve our problems.

Eventually, even the small things, like the office decor or the taste of the coffee from the office machine, drive us crazy. We feel frustrated and profoundly unhappy. This dissatisfaction can hardly be contained in the workplace and it often leads to an imbalance in our personal lives.

Sound familiar?

This book is for you if you work for a large corporation and want to maximize what you get out of your work. It’s for you if, instead of leaving your corporate job to seek your fortune in a startup or as a freelancer, you want to do something about your state of dissatisfaction and make what you have work in your favour. This book collects direct and indirect experiences that have helped me, and people I know, get the best out of our jobs and, more broadly, our lives.

A corporate survival guide

This is the book I wish I’d read 13 years ago. As much as I’ve learned from all the books on startups and entrepreneurship and freelancing and leadership, what I wish I’d read was a guide to surviving and thriving in the insanity of corporations. Because they are crazy, and you’ll see why in Chapter 2.

In the past 13 years, I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve boiled with anger and made fists of frustration more times than I can count. My dissatisfaction affected my personal life and drove me to keep changing jobs, looking for the one that was going to make me happy, until finally I figured out three things.

One, that I didn’t know everything (as I thought I did).

Two, that I needed to learn more about myself and others and develop tools for improving the way I dealt with people and challenging situations if I wanted to have a shot at success in life (whether in the corporate world or elsewhere).

And three, that happiness isn’t found in a specific job or company. Happiness is within us, and if we learn how to find it, we position ourselves to succeed in any environment we put ourselves in.

I know it may sound like some weird new-age self-improvement stuff, but it’s not. Or maybe it is, but I haven’t come to it from that place. I reached this conclusion from a starting point of professional ambition and the desire to be successful and make good money. This is what I’ve wanted from the start of my career.

I realized that nothing of what I was doing was helping me get enough in return for my efforts and sacrifices. People I saw as less talented than me were getting promoted over me, people were taking advantage of my work, and I blamed these people for standing in the way of me getting what I deserved. I decided I needed to do something different, to change something in my approach. This book is the result of what I discovered I needed to change.

How did I come to this epiphany?

My tipping point

It took me a while to reach this realization. First, there was The Glimpse That I Ignored, and then there was My Tipping Point.

The Glimpse That I Ignored was a book.

A friend of mine had suggested I read a copy of Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success by Keith Ferrazzi and lent it to me. I was 28 and I’d never read a non-fiction book in my life. I thought reading non-fiction was a waste of time. (Yes, I was that full of myself.)

One day, it was lying on the table and I was bored, so I picked it up. Now, the essence of the book is exactly what it says on the cover: you should never eat alone. Meaning that every time you do something as basic as eating, if you do it alone, you miss the opportunity of connecting with people, of exposing yourself to situations that may teach you something. You miss the chance to spend time with people whose company you enjoy. I thought, OK, this is interesting, and it makes sense. But it didn’t sink in, so I didn’t change a thing in my approach towards life, and I didn’t read any other non-fiction books because I thought I didn’t need to. (My ego was huge back then – I guess you can tell by now!)

Fast-forward five years.

As a result of one of my many miserable corporate moments, I went looking for a new solution – a happy place. I decided to move to the UK and join eBay for the second time in my life. When I arrived in London, for the very first time in my career I felt out of my depth. In hindsight, it was a crazy move because I had left my friends, my family, a job I knew I could do well, and my own country, to go to a place I’d only visited for a long weekend, and to join a company I had, just four years before, decided to leave because it didn’t make me happy. To top it all off, I moved with my fiancée, who wasn’t fluent in English and didn’t really want to live so far away from her family. How about that for a crazy-decision-to-seek-random-happiness?

I quickly realized that the speed at which the market moved in London was completely different to how things were in Italy, and that I could lose my job in a second, without even putting a foot wrong. (I did, in fact, come very close. As part of a big reorganization in 2015, the entire analytics team, of which I was a part, was put under notice period and half of us were let go to cut costs. Less than one year later they rehired even more analysts, all of them different people who needed training and onboarding. As I said, corporations are insane!)

I knew that, as good as I thought I was, I wasn’t good enough here. Or at least, for the very first time in my life, I didn’t feel good enough. I’d moved from playing in the Fourth League of data analytics to trying to play in the Premier League, and I needed tools to help me play the game at this level. At this point I remembered Keith Ferrazzi’s book. I remembered that it talked about building a network as a safety net and looking for a job before you really need it (more on this in Chapter 6), and I thought a network could help me feel less alone, less isolated, give me something to hold on to in case things went bad. So, I bought the book again and I read it, but this time with a clear need and an open and receptive mind.

Then I asked myself: How do I build a network here outside of Italy? I quickly realized that I needed tools to be able to understand human beings, especially because things in London worked in a very different way from Milan, Verona or Bern (the only other cities I had lived in before). The places people went, their habits, the customs, it was all different. In Italy I had no friends from outside of Italy; in London you come across people from all over the world. I understood people like me, but only those and, as my close friends like to say, it’s a good thing there aren’t too many like me. What I needed was to figure out how I could have an impact on someone who sees the world very differently to me, who comes from a different place, who has a different culture/religion/heritage. I needed to become interesting and relevant to as many people as I could. I didn’t know how to do it, and it made me feel that I was lacking.

Ferrazzi’s book was full of good tips. I followed most of them, and they worked. But I thought: maybe there’s more? Maybe I can learn new stuff that will help me socialize, build a network, make me grow?

So, I started reading more and more non-fiction. On all kinds of topics related to happiness, purpose, business, relationships and personal growth. I will share my must-read list later in the book.

I didn’t anticipate the end result when I started this journey: by better understanding people, by trying to create a safety net, I would finally understand the characteristics of the corporate world that had caused me so much unhappiness. And I would learn how to deal with these to my own advantage, becoming a more interesting and a more interested person – a better person – in the process.

A corporate success framework

Today, I have a framework for being a better version of myself and loving what I do – most of the time anyway. It’s a framework that I believe would have prevented me from making some of the mistakes I made in the past, and that I believe will stop me from making catastrophic mistakes in the future. It’s also a framework for Getting Shit Done, which makes me really happy.

That’s what this book is all about. It’s basically the systems I built to manage my full-of-myself-ness and get the most out of what I do for at least eight hours a day.

The framework itself is pretty simple. It starts with four Corporate Truths that you have to accept if you’re going to stay working in a corporate environment:

Corporate Truth No. 1 #ItsAGameOfThrones

Corporate Truth No. 2 #ThereIsNoFair

Corporate Truth No. 3 #ConsensusRules

Corporate Truth No. 4 #PerceptionIsReality

Once you accept these, you can work within their limitations. Refuse to accept them, and the irrationality, hypocrisy, falsity, unfairness, cynicism and obsessive need for consensus that are part and parcel of a big organization will cause you endless pain and frustration. (Don’t worry, I promise, there’s a lot of good stuff about working in corporates too, which we’ll get to at the start of Chapter 2.)

We’ll go into detail as